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Providence Pizza Bracket

Providence often gets publicity from travel and food writers from across the country. Articles have been written in the Boston Globe, USA today and Travel & Leisure magazine about Providence’s popular food scene. Whenever I see these articles I am glad that our city is getting good publicity, but I always feel like they are writing about somewhere other than the place I grew up. For somebody who loves food, I never seem to recognize any of the restaurants that are written about. I don’t feel like these articles, which focus on primarily fancy restaurants, do the city justice. At its core Providence is great because of all of its cheap but high quality food. Some of our best food is at diners, burger joints, and most of all pizza places.

The idea behind this bracket is to determine once and for all what is the best pizza in Providence, and do so in an interactive and fun way. Rather than just make a list of our favorite pizza places, we wanted to allow our readers to give their input and opinions as well. Here is how it works:

The Concept

We took 20 pizza places from all around the city and ranked them based off of their yelp reviews. For example, the number one overall seed, La Broa Pizza, has a 4.7 rating rating, the number two seed, Bob and Timmy’s, has a 4.5 rating, etc. We then set them up into a 20 “team” tournament style bracket. Each day we will post a round of results.

How we chose the pizza

We tried to get all of the most popular pizza places in the city, from all neighborhoods. It was limited to only places where pizza is the main thing on the menu, so fancy restaurants like Al Forno, where the pizza is renowned, did not qualify. The one exception is classic RI strip pizza, which we felt had to make the cut, and was put as the 20th and final seed. For those wondering, strip pizza is available at bakeries throughout the city. We didn’t put chains into the field, but franchises with a few local locations were included. Flatbread Company and Piezoni’s had too many locations to qualify, and other chains like Dominos and Little Caesars were also left off. We did our best to represent the whole city, but our three judges do all live on the East Side, so we might be biased. We attempted to ask friends around the city their favorite neighborhood spots, but if you feel like we left something off, please let us know. Hit us up on Twitter @j_ferrari23, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/watertrash/, email us at watertrash.prov@gmail.com, or feel free to comment on the article below.

Voting Process

There are 3 judges for this bracket: Jackson Ibelle, Adam Young and Ben Licht. We tried each pizza place and then voted on the match ups. For the first two rounds our votes are going to count for 100% of the matchup. If we get enough feedback from our readers, then the final rounds will be put to a poll and the winners will be chosen by the people of Providence.

Voting Criteria

The main thing that counts is just how good the pizza is, but there are other factors as well. Pizza isn’t meant to hurt your wallet, so the cheaper the better. Conveniences like do they deliver?, how much variety? and is it by-the-slice? will be taken into account as well. Still, in the end taste matters most.

Send us your bracket!

We have printable Pizza Brackets here, so fill one out and send us a picture on social media or email! If we get a lot of responses we will post them on here later this week and we can open the later rounds to voting.